RDBMS

Note to Self:One must remember not to accidently pull the power cord out of your OpenSolaris server.

Somewhere between the sudden power down, and booting into different Boot Zones my MySQL database has lost records and the Apache HTTP server logs are missing whole time periods in the access logs. I have been digging through the OpenSolaris Bible looking for a reason the data is missing. There appears to be no ZFS snapshots missing, and MySQL show there have been no deletions from the tables and they aren’t corrupt, the Data in the logs and MyISAM records are just missing.

I can point to the File buffering of the file system for the loss, except for the fact that the MySQL database records have been in the database for days, and the Apache Logs have lost whole days worth of records.

I’ll keep you posted, if I find out, as this does not bode well for OpenSolaris if it looses data. In the mean time I’ll be more careful of the power and switch the power connection to the Telecom USP.

I am undertaking the task of building a personal server which more or less emulates the type of environment I use at work. In this stage I built a small system from the Intel 330 BOXD945GCLF2 motherboard. This is a dual core hyper-threaded Atom chipset that looks like a quad core server, only at 1/4 the wattage, and about 1/3 the CPU crunch power. But it’s still looks and feels snappy enough.

I’ve currently loaded OpenSolaris as Solaris is a mature OS common in the IT world which also is very well tailored to mutli-core CPU’s.

Not that this is going to be instructive, but about a month ago I thought that separating my technical blogging from my ‘life’ blogging would improve the clarity of my thinking. But it has not, it was a distraction, and a bit schizophrenic, and actually an inhibitor to posting. I can’t really separate my techie from my personal opinions. They are intertwined and interact on more levels than would seem, at first, to be evident. So in that vein, I was required to reintegrate the two blogs.

This looked easy, but since I had included all the posts from my three or four years of blogging, selected from each by their respective ‘slants’. It was not a simple dump and load of the MySQL database in which the content resided. So I downloaded the latest MySQL community server and various tools and recreated databases containing the two dumps from the blog databases and cross seeded them to patch them back together. Simple! Except that the original blog was wordpress 2.6.2 and I had built the second one as 2.7. Guess what, my original MySQL dump that included ALL the compied posts before the split, was a different schema from the the newer dumps. But owing to the fact that I’m a brilliant DBA, it only required two days of backbreaking, mind exercising MySQL learning to solve the issues 😉

Now I’ll never be a WordPress expert, but I actually liked the work. It’s refreshing to learn, that I can learn new things at my age. While I am an excellent Sybase DBA, and now feel very good about knowledge of MySQL also.

They just have to fix this one quibble or two I have with MySQL where it involves ……

I have been, and will continue to be amused about the Storm over Big Brother database. Amused because I know ultimately that it will fail to stop terrorism, but also that I know how easily such a system can be overwhelmed into oblivion. The only reason for these databases is for political control, not for protection, but political gain. Security Theater, and nothing more.

Consider for a minute, should someone discover a method to product Weapons of Mass Destruction out of say, peanut butter. A database would have to track the purchase and use of every gram of peanut butter, and latter peanuts, raw and roasted, and then farmers who could grow peanuts. The data would grow exponentially and it wouldn’t find anyone who could or does produce WMD’s from peanut butter. It wouldn’t even be able to detect that the Peanut butter Bomb was a hoax.

One thing I’ve noticed about Twitter and Jaiku, is a common thread in IT, Scaleability! It’s an issue that I worked on in my days with AT&T Wireless. Mobile phone vendors have been dealing with SMS and voice connection transactions for many years and the volume of such transactions have only grown over the years since I had to deal with 25+ million transactions per day. If the current growing pains of these Web 2.0 social networking systems are projected, they are both headed for failure in the form of catastrophic system overload. While I admire innovative Ideas, like these services, their infrastructure does not appear well thought out. A bit more foundation in the infrastructure, and less optimism of the performance, should have been the first design requirement.

Being a database kind of guy, I can’t help but believe that a fundamental disconnect in the understanding of transactions utilized in these systems is the root cause here. I have yet to see a significant teaching or understanding of database issues in the current crop of programmers. There seems to be belief that data analysis is not a worth while task in current programming efforts. I see this in the form of articles detailing new ‘database’ products and methods, and new ‘lightweight’ database processes, etc. Mostly the requirements for ‘new’ DBMS and ‘Lightweight’ processes, is the underestimations of the data tasks of most modern IT functions. If you don’t know your own data, you don’t know anything. Any system that is not fundamentally tied in with a database system is merely a calculator.

I have monitored all the discussions of DRM with regards to Music and Movies, but until I started installing a Sybase ASE 15.0.1 installation, as a first stage to a Sybase 12.0 upgrade at the company which I work for, that I realized that Sybase must hate it’s own customers. I say this as that’s the only reason why they would use SYSAM and this draconian DRM license software in Version 15.xx. They want to put themselves out of business by pissing off their user base.

My company have a contract with Sybase Ireland and I am an honest DBA installing a new version of Sybase ASE exactly like the one it will replace. I’m not trying to steal from Sybase. But this DRM assumes that I am a thief, and that I cannot be trusted. Even when we as a company pay thousands per year for support we barely use (because Sybase is a solid product). I’m a thief by their own DRM definitions.

We will be moving to MySQL, as soon as we are able, Sybase will be loosing yet another customer because of their suicidal business plan.